Indigenous literary criticism has, to date, focused on human stories, histories, and politics, which is understandable given the catastrophic impacts of colonialism. Yet many of those impacts resulted from colonial efforts to undermine self-determination through attacks on the interspecies relationships central to Indigenous economies and worldviews. To limit our analysis to the human is to abandon some of the most significant epistemological foundations of Indigenous subjectivity. Critical kinship conceives of the human—and our cultural productions—as an extension of and response to our condition as participants in the other-than-human world. This presentation examines some of the ways that contemporary Indigenous writers, performers, and visual artists articulate human and other-than-human relationships as both exercises of imaginative sovereignty and imperative models of ethical kinship practice.

BIO: Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is Chair of the First Nations Studies Program and Associate Professor of First Nations Studies and English at UBC on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam people. His work includes Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, the Indigenous epic fantasy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles, and the co-edited anthologies Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature and, with James H. Cox, the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Current projects include a cultural history of badgers and a study of critical kinship in Indigenous literature.

*Lunches will be provided at noon Social Justice @UBC Lectures at no cost to all participants who RSVP: jane.charles@ubc.ca